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Yes, you absolutely can write code using flowcharts, and I've got two practical examples from my career in videogames. Obviously, both were in specialized sub-domains, as the bulk of our general work is in C++.

First example: I worked at a place that allowed artists to wire up nodes in Maya using a circuit-like logic system. For input, they'd use timers, triggers, environmental sources (time of day), etc. Then they'd connect those inputs to various logic gate nodes (AND, OR, math, branching, delays, etc), and then to various output nodes that would affect the game world in various ways, such as triggering animations, environments, music/sound effects, and so on. This gave artists an incredible amount of power to shape the world if they were clever enough with their wiring skills, and all without programmer support. It was telling, though, that we eventually added a "Lua Script" node, because sometimes complex logic is really hard to do with circuit-type wiring.

Second example: In widespread use today, many game developers generate HLSL shader code using visual tools. Again, the same sort of logical wiring occurs. The connections represents an RGBA color source, or maybe a vector, while the nodes represent methods to transform that data. To blend two color sources together, for example, you pick a particular blending operation node, then just visually connect the sources and output. The visual programming paradigm means that technical artists can use this system rather than programmers, allowing them to tune their materials exactly how they'd like.

This sort of visual programming works really well when dealing with data flow in a fairly constrained environment. Other real-world examples include creation of sophisticated virtual musical instruments using visual programming techniques. Native Instruments has some products that work this way, like Reaktor. Example: https://www.native-instruments...

Here's the specific notice I mentioned,, and they do have beta drivers for the hardware, but not yet for this:

Validation of AU (Audio Units) Plug-ins Fails in Logic Pro X

All Native Instruments Audio Units plug-ins will not pass the AU validation and therefore will not be available in Logic Pro X under OS X 10.11. The root cause of this issue has been identified and a workaround is still being developed in close contact with Apple. We will keep you updated on any developments regarding this issue.

I cannot confirm or deny anything, I'm a humble Windows user and the only NI product I use is Kontakt.

I do a lot of odds and ends in Max/MSP and Reaktor for work. Normally I do the more robust stuff in C, ObjC and Ruby.

They're "dataflow" languages, you have boxes that transform data, and you wire them together in the order you want the transformation to happen. Everything's graphical. It's designed to be easy enough that someone with no computer background could use it– a composer or synth programmer will learn it for a few days and then off they go.

I've noticed some things:

• Code sharing almost never happens. You can't email a snippet of your "patch" (a program) as text, you can't post it in a text box at stackoverflow, it's almost impossible to communicate with other people about what you're working on without emailing the binary document. When you send someone a patch to look at, you're doing a lot of "look to the left of this," and "look for the red box."
• Code reuse can be difficult because boxes generally aren't typed in any way, so interfaces are difficult to verify and document.
• ... This leads the dev environments to only be as good as their templates and default libraries. People prefer Reaktor to Max not because it's easier for developing, but because it comes with a bunch of really useful default synths and sampler instruments, which people will tweak slightly.
• It's very difficult to talk about the algorithm itself, you have to spend all your time orienting yourself. If the program you're building is a simple pipeline, it's easy to see what's happening, but if you have loops and divergences it becomes very hard to understand what's going on in the abstract.
• Data types are a hack. You end up having to have different color wires that carry different things, type-tagging of binary data is routine, and you often have to do conversions because the environment runs different data connections at different levels of service. Trial and error is usually required to see if a box responds to a message in the way you want; I can write correct C without having to run the code, I would never try that in Reaktor.
• Execution order is a hack. If you connect one output to two inputs, which input will process the output first? There's conventions: In Max: the rightmost box will act first, and your graph is traversed depth-first right-to-left (this rule introduces ambiguity when dataflow is fed back). There are also boxes/modules that can make execution order explicit in various ways. (Note that in most cases we don't care about execution order, and the implicit multithreading is quite nice.)
• Doing N of anything is a pain. In Max, It's easy to build a sampler that can play one sample. It's easy to build one that can play two. It's basically impossible to build a sampler that can play N, without using the textual scripting language (ha!) to dynamically rewrite your patch based on creation arguments.

If I have something thats useful, I'll often conceptualize stuff in Max and then rewrite it in C with CoreAudio, because I know the Max code is basically a dead end for its usefulness.

I have yet to meet the synthesizer that can even remotely duplicate the dulcet noises of the old-fashioned dead trees and metal strings of my grand piano.

You would be surprised at how well some of the sampled, Virtual Instruments have progressed.

East West Quantum Leap Pianos

Native Instruments Piano Collection

8dio 1928 Steinway

Now again, so be clear, I'm not supporting the position that computers will ever replace musicians or actual, real instruments, mind you. I just wanted to point out that VST's have really come a long way, particularly in the last 10 years or so. No more are you stuck with Garritan Pocket Orchestra, and sad, tinny reproductions of instruments based on the PC wavetables. If you've got the money to spend, you can get some amazing sounds, with a stunning amount of dynamics and articulations availble.

Beat making software is FREE or near-free. Audacity doesn't cost a dime. Paying to clear samples, well that's a topic for another article. As far as making your own sounds, there are tons of free and inexpensive software synths, and free or inexpensive WAV collections (samples or loops). I own a bunch of $2-$5 beat making apps for my iPhone. Native Instruments iMaschine costs $5 and allows you to sample and compose songs using your own recordings/samples. I'm not sure that 'beat making' needs to be much cheaper, although I applaud the effort to design open source solutions.
http://www.native-instruments.com/#/products/producer/imaschine/

As far as recording songs and producing high-quality finished product, there are of course expensive DAW options (ProTools, Cubase, Logic, Sonar, Digital Performer) and less expensive options (Reaper, Ardour -- hey, time to figure out how it works _is_ money). Free options include Garageband, which is pretty damned good, and the new Presonus Studio One Free, which I have yet to try. Why something special has to be created specifically for hiphop? That doesn't make sense.

It's called Traktor Scratch, and these days it's fairly widely used among DJ's: http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/dj/traktor-pro/?content=1085 It'll never feel the same as playing real vinyl though.

Vinyl will always be in because it is superior for DJs mixing music. Even in the age of digital recording, time-coded vinyl is all the rage to overlay the digital recordings onto a more user-friendly interface.

Looks like another limited system based on standard notational systems. Nowadays I prefer music automatons that create highly dynamic loops. Stuff that you can build in Reaktor, and that you control with lots of MIDI controllers and analog inputs (read: microphone, instruments). My music scores would look like those of Aphex Twin: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/Lustiges/aphex_twin.jpg ^^

Audiophiles are dumb uber-rich people who spend millions to buy 95% snake oil products and 5% performance improvements only a machine could measure.
Tubes are better than bipolar transistors only when you overdrive them and produce a distorted output wave; in that situation tubes have a gentler and better sounding clipping because of the type of harmonics produced. If you want this kind of behaviour from a transistor amp, you go for mosfets.
Besides guitar amps, that can be perfectly emulated digitally, nowadays tubes have advantages over solid state counterparts only in the power RF amplification niche.

As soon as they can run Guitar Rig 2 and the entire suite of native instruments applications, I might consider it.
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=gui tarrig2swe_us

Some people you should really check out if you're at all interested in live electronica:

Jamie Lidell...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lidell
One half of Super_Collider (with Christian Vogel), does loads of cool stuff with Max/MSP.

Tim Exile...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(artist)
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=tim exile_us&ftu=a753afc697500c1&flash=9
Does live improvised D&B using his own Reaktor patch. Check out the video in the second link.

Monolake...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolake
One of the key drivers of Ableton Live.

Cursor Miner...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_miner
One of the best live shows I've ever seen. Pure energy and more creativity in his little finger than most people can muster at all.

This is a really exciting time for live electronic music. The creative tools are finally getting to a standard where you don't have to be a programmer to do interesting stuff.

Now we just need the open source stuff to catch up with commercial software.

Doug

Streaming: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/nicecast/
There are very few free alternatives and they are somewhat complicated

Audio Routing: http://www.jackosx.com/
Free

DJing: http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=tra ktor3_us
Not free, but can stream directly to a shoutcast server.

Almost any multi-channel soundcard works with OS X.

Seriously, there have been moments in the game that I've hit some tricky combination of chords and just Felt It. And it felt good.

If this worked so well for you, get a cheap electric guitar or even NI's Guitar Rig and play along with a bunch of your favorite MP3s. You're going to be amazed at how easily you can fit some improvised melodies or even chord sequences into most of the (mainstream) music available today - on a real guitar, without being a genius or a rockstar. Start with songs you know well, don't be discouraged by wrong notes - if you keep trying (like in the game), you're gonna find the right ones. Improve the songs and add what you always felt was missing.

In fact, that's how I started to play: listen, find your way on the fretboard, experiment, examine and gradually Feel where to fret next. It works, honest! Give it a try if you can. You're going to get a lot more out of the real thing than out of that (IMHO kinda silly) game! Especially if you use GR2 [/shameless plug]

I do think the Hero series is a great appetizer, but as you said, it's no comparison to the real thing. A real guitar isn't that hard to handle - unless you want to play like Joe Satriani and the likes.

My amateur rig is a laptop running Traktor DJ Studio and a visualizer called G-Force. Traktor DJ is leaps and bounds ahead of any pro DJ software out there. It's a commercial package with anything a DJ or amateur could ever want. Beatmatching, streaming, looping, it's all there. It will even help you "work up" to a level of mastery until you go out and buy real turntables. G-Force is a great shareware app that will give a set-it-and-forget-it light show with nothing but an ordinary projector.

Finally, here's some advice from when I first started. Learning "how to DJ" involves three things you must master. First, learn the equipment, which isn't too tough if you're already an ubergeek. Second, get familiar with a whole spectrum of music, which can be hard if your tastes are polarized against genres like rap or country. Last, and most importantly, you must refine your skills to "work a crowd" and respond to your audience's tastes. Developing that charisma is by far the most challenging aspect of becoming a DJ.

[shameless plug] For more tips, I set up a pseudo-DJ tutorial at my website. [/shameless plug] Good luck.

Studio time is expensive, man.

hiring a producer

studio musicians

whatever you need to get the sound you want) can be really expensive

Traktor

The first time I ever played with Reaktor I thought to myself "damn when is somebody just going to put a PC in a synth with a lightweight real-time customizable OS (open source if possible), a big screen, lots of programmable control surfaces, and a something flexible and powerful like Reaktor?"

And here it is .. except for the OS. Still this is pretty damn cool!

PS: Anybody else get a chuckle out of this:

NEKO 64? frees you from all of the frustrating limitations imposed by closed, proprietary systems, while still maintaining the virtues of an all-in-one keyboard instrument. ..later..

NEKO 64? is so versatile it can virtually run any plugin or application designed for the Windows XP operating system including products from Steinberg, Native Instruments, Synapse Audio, IK Multimedia and many others!

I guess their definition of "proprietary" is different than mine!

It's probably not so important for the average musician but I hope all the interfaces are MIDI or otherwise accessible by the programmer.

The brother of FinalScratch is Traktor DJ Studio. Both can be found on Native Instruments

Traktor gives you all the capability of final scratch but instead of specially encoded vinyl, you control with with any combination of keyboard mouse and MIDI. Plug in an Oxygen 8 or even a $15 DM2 through DM2-midi and you can use "toys" to run a serious gig.

If this thing can send midi commands, and if latency can be fixed by driver settings, this has the potential to be a very useful and powerful tool in Traktor.

This will never totally replace vinyl, but it's great being able to lug around a laptop instead of huge crates of wax. The new version also plays VERY well with my iPod and iTunes.

Runs on my XP, also runs on Mac.
(and I love my Game Theater XP)

I'd imagine something like granular synthesis and/or resynthesis could come up with something like this...

Are you familiar with Reaktor by Native Instruments? It has lots of cool stuff in this direction, like a granular synth module with a wicked 'freeze' button which just keeps the sound playing, without advancing the sample (if that makes any sense). Results from the said module sound really cool, sometimes without the artifacts (chopping/flanging) caused by normal stretching. But then, it's not really timestretching anymore, but who really cares about technicalities?

with the recent release of digital performer 3.1, i heard that MOTU has put all developers onto the osX version which i heard is in beta. 3.1 is supposedly the last os9.x version.

i can't wait until i can do all my music stuff in osX, but in addition to MOTU i have to wait for native-instruments to get going on reaktor for osX.

hopefully, the protools announcement will help others get their asses in gear.

james

I can't see Jazz listed...

There's going to be a lot of work to catch up with software such as Cubase SX or Reaktor...

Especially I saw no standard for plug-ins, like VST, for example (which already is multiplatform so could probably be ported to Linux, after all it's just API specs). I didn't see any software that gives audio and midi multitrack integration either.

Another huge problem is going to be the drivers for the many professional audio cards (none of them has drivers for Linux, as far as I know)

i asked a friend who works for Native Instruments, one of the most important producers for music software, why they don't release their stuff for linux. To my surprise he replied that their code is so shit and hacky that they don't have
the ressources to do the port!

What I would like to see is a implementation of ASIO and VST to linux. That yould help alot since the protocol is already tune for audio. And porting any original program like cubase or reaktor would be alot more easier. Same thing for VST which is already a standard plugin interface, and the IRIX part is already done...